Transcript for Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's Social Ambition

0. Introduction

We like to imagine great artists as being indifferent to worldly prestige, that they are somehow above fawning over status symbols. And yet the greatest playwright of all time was obsessed with getting himself into the upper class. Shakespeare spent an exorbitant amount of money that he could have spent on his parents, his wife, his children, his craft, on buying a coat of arms to become a gentleman. He literally bought his way into the upper class.

My guest today is one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars, Stephen Greenblatt, and he's going to help us make sense of Shakespeare's social ambition. Is Shakespeare a hypocrite for displaying the very social pretensions he mocks in his plays? And how did Shakespeare think about his craft? Was it entertainment? Was it a vehicle for profit or was there some higher goal?

Working through Shakespeare's motivations were so valuable because I recognize them in myself, but even stronger; it was uncanny, reading how similar his parents' situation were to mine. His father's upwards trajectory was cut short by financial setbacks when he was a young boy. And when I was around the same age, my father's was as well by 2008. His mother is from a once noble lineage that had fallen into obscurity and so is my mother from a great house of an empire that had ceased to exist. I found in Shakespeare the same desire to restore my family's legacy. And so I was almost moved to tears when I read Professor Greenblatt's dramatization of what Shakespeare must have been thinking when he got that coat of arms:

I, Shakespeare, am not someone who can be treated like a hired servant or whipped like a vagabond; I am someone who does not merely pretend on stage to be a gentleman. I am a true gentleman entitled to bear arms, both by virtue of my father's distinguished service and by virtue of my mother's distinguished family. I have with the fruits of my labor and my imagination returned my family to the moment before things began to fall apart. I have affirmed the distinction of my mother's name and restored my father's honor. I have laid claim to my lost inheritance. I have created that inheritance.

(Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare)

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1. Coat of Arms

Johnathan Bi: My favorite story in your Shakespeare biography has to be how he bought his way into the upper class. So let me give a rough background and context for our listeners.

Shakespeare was born in 1564 to John Shakespeare, his dad was a glover, and to Mary Arden. Now Arden was this prestigious noble family, but Mary Arden was part of a branch that had fallen from grace, so to speak. So Shakespeare grew up not as a gentleman status, as a commoner. However, he was on an upward trajectory. So his father was doing very well in his business. He was an alderman, he was a public man of service. Shakespeare had been trained in grammar school in Latin, and he was expecting to go to university. And in his teenage years, his dad put in an application for a coat of arms that would effectively make the Shakespeare family into gentlemen.

Unfortunately, financial tragedies hit. They weren't able to complete that coat of arms application. And it was almost ten-plus years later that Shakespeare himself purchased that coat of arms and turned himself and his descendants into gentlemen. And I love that story because it's comforting in some way, because I recognized my desire for vanity and social prestige. You know, you tend to think of that as a base desire, but it's almost comforting to realize that one of the great geniuses of the world also spent so much of his attention and time fixated on social advancement. And so it not only humanizes Shakespeare, also makes me feel a bit better about myself.

Stephen Greenblatt: Probably because of romanticism and its aftermath, we tend to think of the great artists as bohemians, indifferent to social status. And indeed, many of Shakespeare's contemporaries were either bohemians or more likely they were, if they had been born into a reasonably comfortable circumstance, they were on the way down by virtue of being playwrights. But as you say, Shakespeare seems to have moved in the opposite direction. It's not perhaps quite as, how should we say, comforting or innocent as it sounds, only because the distinction between who was a gentleman and who was not a gentleman meant a hell of a lot more in the late 16th century.

It's one I can understand truthfully. My grandfather, who came to America from Lithuania in the late 1880s or very early 1890s, was what was called a ragpicker. That's the absolute lowest point you can get without simply starving to death. It meant he went around picking up stuff on the street and trying to resell it. And my father became a lawyer. That was the sort of classic American pattern, from one generation to another, of starting at the bottom and then reaching out.

And when I was an undergraduate, when I asked my father what my grandfather, whom I didn't know, did, and he said, “oh, he had a horse and wagon and would go around.” He wasn't hiding anything. But when I was an undergraduate at Yale, I remember sitting in a little carrel in the library with a little desk with books in front of me. And I saw there was something called The Boston Register for 1890 or whatever it was, that had a list of citizens of the city of Boston and by profession. So I looked up Morris Greenblatt, my grandfather, and that was the first moment in which I saw the word ragpicker. So that was a gigantic jump, me sitting in the library at Yale, super fancy, WASP university, and this very close relative, I mean, only two generations before, this person was at the bottom of the barrel. That's as close probably as we're going to get to the absolutely extreme difference.

So if you were counted a gentleman in this period, if you were armigerous, as they called it, which meant that you had a coat of arms to your name, you were entitled to be treated with respect, it meant that people were expected to take their hats off to you, to stand up when you came in the room, all kinds of treatment of that kind.

Johnathan Bi: Executions were different between the gentlemen...

Stephen Greenblatt: Even executions, but that's a literacy question. It meant, had you gone to school and had you learned Latin? They kept the medieval rule that said that if you were a priest, you were entitled to be tried in the ecclesiastical court and not in the civil court for a serious crime. And it happened that in the ecclesiastical court, you weren't... There was no death penalty. But in the civil courts, there were death penalties. So if you could somehow prove that you were a priest, you... A cleric, you could be tried in the ecclesiastical court and you would be... You wouldn't be hanged, quartered, disemboweled. And that was the distinction. And the way you proved it was to read a sentence in Latin.